Posts Tagged ‘development’

Are you looking for a super-simple quick reference for WP_Query and all of its parameters? Loosely described, WP_Query is how WordPress displays posts defined by a variety of parameters, and keeping that of the available parameters can be a monumental task. It’s easy to forget all that you can do with WP_Query if you aren’t working with it every single day. Of course, this brings me to this handy Gist. It’s nothing flashy, but it is a super-simple text file listing and describing all the WP_Query parameters. I’m not sure how long this will be around, so you might want to download it ASAP for reference when you need it.

WordPress is an open source blogging platform, which (amongst other things) means that everything is built out in the open. You can freely follow along or even participate in development. If you’re curious about what’s going on under the hood, the best thing to follow is the WordPress Trac. This is where all of the magic happens, bugs and features are submitted, discussed, and acted upon all through this one site. Of course, if that’s a bit too much code and you’re looking for a more toned down highlight-oriented news and discussion blog, check out the official WordPress Development Updates. Here, you can follow along on major issues or changes. Think of it a sneak peak to the future of WordPress. Follow along and learn what makes your favorite blogging platform so great. Before you know it, you might be filing your first bug report, or even your first patch.

The students and projects for WordPress’s portion of Google Summer of Code 2011 have been announced. The students will be working with well-known community mentors on documentation revisions, file uploader enhancements, “Local Storage Drafts backup,” learn.wordpress.org (possibly similar to learn.wordpress.com), “enhanced emails,” threaded comment enhancements, “Extending WP Webservices,” additional language packs and enhancements to existing packs, UI improvements for the Android app, “Full-throttle Trac Annihilation” (clearing as many trac tickets as possible), “WordPress Move,” and “Template Versioning.” Congratulations to those of you who made it in this year, and we look forward to seeing what you bring to WordPress!

The Google Summer of Code 2011 application period has begun, and WordPress is accepting applications from eager students. There’s a lot of talent out there ready to shine, and the development team is excited to see what new and great things will be brought to the world of WordPress this year. For those interested in contributing to WordPress via Google’s program, the development team has posted some tips on submitting your application and a schedule outline. If you’re a student interested in WordPress development, send in your application today and show them what you can do.

The WordPress development team has applied to be a part of Google’s Code-in contest to encourage eager high school and secondary school students to contribute WordPress’ future. The development team is currently compiling a task list and looking for suggestions from the community, which can be left as comments here. Do you plan to be a part of Google’s Code-in contest, and will you claiming any of the WordPress tasks this year?

This post written on the WeblogToolsCollection.com forums as a news submission has been well received by plugin developers that have taken notice. The article explains how to include CSS and JavaScript conditionally so that the code is not loaded on every page of the site. If you think about it, there are many plugins that only do something once in a blue moon. Table of contents, text manipulators, galleries, sliders, etc, etc. If only they loaded their frontend code strictly when necessary, most page loads would suddenly become much lighter. This technique if implemented by plugin authors sounds like it could have a significant impact on end users websites, especially when it comes to loading times. I’m always impressed with the speed of WordPress when I install a fresh copy without any plugins. WordPress loads very quickly both on the front and back ends. However, once I activate 30 or […]

Last Thursday, the WordPress core development team got together to discuss the upcoming version of WordPress. In this meeting, it was announced that WordPress 2.9 is now feature frozen meaning additional features would be postponed to the next branch. The first proposed release date of WordPress 2.9 was October 31st but that goal is not attainable. Instead, expect to see Beta 1 around October 31st with release candidates released during the month of November. Depending on what happens during the testing phase, we may see WordPress 2.9 stable released during the second half of November or early December. Expect to see details regarding how to participate in the testing process show up on the WordPress development blog within the next week or so.

Stefan Vervoort of WPToy.com has published a new and improved version of his WordPress Theme Development Checklist. This new checklist is provided in PDF form but it’s very easy to print. The checklist covers the following points: General Stylesheets Browser Compatibility Pages Styled Everything? Standard CSS Classes Validate WordPress Code Blog Elements This is one of those guides you could put up on the wall to serve as a quick reference.

Are you constantly hunting the WordPress Codex for functions and template tags? I know I spend a lot of time doing this whenever I am working on a new plugin. Andy Stratton too did the same until he created WPLookup. WPLookup will take your query and take you to the corresponding WordPress Codex documentation in the function reference and template tags reference. If your search terms are not found, it will send you directly to a documentation search for your terms. The site is very much in the nascent stages. And, I’m sure there is a lot more that can be added. One suggestion could be that instead of sending the user directly to WordPress Codex, WPLookup can generate a search results page with a link to the codex article as well a link to the function declaration in the WordPress code using PHPXref. The search results page can contain […]

About the Author

James

James began using WordPress in 2004. Being new to WordPress (and blogging in general), he quickly found the WordPress Support Forums and basically never left. James currently resides in sunny Southern California, where he enjoys bringing happiness to millions of WordPress.com users.